Shadowgame Page 11

  "Arly, I want complete control of the east wing of the house. All the rooms on every story of that wing. I want security on the outside but not a single camera or motion detector on the inside. I want complete privacy. One place I can go where I have absolute privacy after I lock it down. And I don't want anyone else to know. You handle the work yourself."

  He nodded slowly. "Will you at least consider a bodyguard?"

  "I'll think about it," she promised.

  "And wear the transmitter. I went to the trouble of putting it into your watch, the least you can do is wear it." Arly hesitated then took a deep breath. "There's an underground tunnel below the basement levels. It runs beneath the estate and leads to two separate entrances. Your father used the tunnels to bring in people he didn't want you or the staff to see."

  "I should have suspected something like that. Thank you, Arly. Will you show me the tunnels?"

  He nodded reluctantly. "I'll take you there after the police leave."

  Six

  RYLAND was waiting, his mercury-colored eyes hot with emotion. The moment her gaze clashed with his, the memory of his mouth crushing hers rose up to taunt her. Her body instantly grew hot and uncomfortable. Became soft and responsive. Her breath caught in her lungs and she tasted him. Felt him. She felt him deep inside her, filling her, a part of her.

  Stop it, Ryland.

  He was angry with her. She had cut herself off from him. He had been unable to reach her even in her sleep. Ryland had resolved to let her know just what he thought of her behavior, but the moment he saw her he changed his mind. He detested seeing the dark circles under her eyes, shadows that hadn't been there before. She was suffering and he wasn't about to add to it. Forcing down the tidal wave of emotion he spoke softly. It isn't me. I swear to you, I don't do this.

  Yes, you do. You have a… vivid imagination and you broadcast very loudly.

  He saw it then, her need to push him away from her. He had thought it would be the erotic dream they shared, embarrassment or shyness with him. He could get around that. Persuade her. Tempt her. But Lily couldn't believe in him because she couldn't believe in anyone. Whitney had done that to her. Damn the man for leaving her with nothing. "Lily." He said her name gently. Enticing her. Coaxing her. "Thank you for coming when I know it's so difficult for you right now."

  Her blue eyes widened. It was nice to see shock instead of wariness. Ryland tried a smile. "Come here, talk to me."

  Lily stared up into his face, studied his feathery lashes, his strong jaw, the black hair spilling across his forehead. His strict military cut was long gone, replaced with shaggy unruly waves that left him immensely attractive. I do need to talk to you, but not like this. I need to arrange it so we can go someplace where the recorders and cameras won't pick us up.

  His cool gray eyes rested thoughtfully on her face. Lily looked away from him, faint color stealing into her cheeks in spite of her determination to appear serene. She had dreamt of this man. Hot, steamy dreams of sinful sex and passionate responses. She hadn't been alone in that dream. Ryland had somehow been with her, sharing her every fantasy, touching her, kissing her. She closed her eyes, remembering how she had straddled him wildly, without inhibition. It had been a dream. She had needed to escape and she threw herself into it with everything she was. And he knew it.

  "Lily, it was beautiful."

  "I'm not discussing it."

  Ryland let it go because she didn't need to be uncomfortable. The moment he'd laid eyes on her, he knew she was the woman born for him. She might not know it, but it didn't matter. He did, and he was relentless once set on a path. I can shut down the cameras and recorders. I've been doing it for a while, on and off, at first for the practice, now to get them complacent about it. They're used to it enough now they don't come by right away to check on me. You don't want to talk with me this way.

  She didn't. It was too intimate and she didn't trust the intensity of what they shared. She feared every time they spoke telepathically, it strengthened the bond. But more than that, she feared for his health. She could feel his constant pain, felt the drain on his strength. And she had no idea of the consequences of prolonged use of a telepathic connection. If he could remove the threat of the cameras, it was better for them. Better for him. The desire to keep him from harm bordered on obsession. And she couldn't trust that someone else might not be listening.

  Lily looked up at Ryland, drowning in the stark need in his eyes. No one had told her it would be like this, a wild craving that crawled over her skin, heated her blood, and created hunger so deep, so elemental she could hardly bear being separated from him.

  She turned away from him, unable to continue looking at his face. He would know, he could read her easily. The chemistry between them was storming out of control. Sometimes she was afraid if he were out from behind the bars, she would do anything with him, right there, cameras or not.

  "Stop it," his voice was husky, a raw ache in it. "I can't move, not a step. Now you're the one projecting. You're messing me up until I can't think straight."

  "I'm sorry," she whispered the words, knew he could hear her. She didn't turn around, keeping her face averted. "You haven't slept in days, would you like something to help you?"

  "You know why I can't sleep. You can't sleep either. Damn it, you're afraid to sleep." His tone was pitched so low it smoldered. It played over her skin, seeped into her pores, stroked her body so that every cell was alive with a hunger that was edgy and needful. When I sleep I dream of you. Of your body beneath mine. Of my body deep inside yours.

  She knew he dreamt of her, of their bodies tangled together. She shared his erotic dream, his wild fantasies she couldn't hope to match in reality. "It's a complication we didn't expect." She cleared her voice, it was hoarse and unfamiliar. "That's all it is, Ryland. We can get past it if we're disciplined enough."

  "Look at me."

  Lily lifted her gaze to his. She couldn't stop herself from crossing the distance to his side. His hands found hers through the bars even as she felt the heightened awareness of energy, his outpouring to interfere with the equipment.

  "What is it, baby?" He moved beside her, silent, calm, his larger, heavily muscled body brushing against hers protectively right through the iron bars. "Talk to me. Tell me what you found."

  Lily listened to the sound of the ocean, in the background, the water soothing, even though the waves sounded angry. She imagined them rushing toward the shore, crashing against the rocks. Foam gushing into the air, spraying white water high.

  She wished she could roar like the waves, escape out onto the wide raging sea with her wild emotions, not just listen to a tape being played.

  "I was an experiment, Ryland." She said the words so low he had to strain to catch them. "That's what I was to him. An experiment, not his daughter." She tasted the bitterness of betrayal as she spoke the words out loud, her world crashing around her.

  He remained silent, holding her through the bars, feeling the pain in her like a living, breathing entity. Ryland didn't want to say or do the wrong thing. Lily was close to shattering like glass, so he stayed silent.

  Lily took a deep, calming breath, let it out slowly. "I found his secret laboratory. Everything was there. Videotapes of me, of other children. A room where he kept us, where we ate and slept and did his tests. I had a very regimented diet, all the best nutrition, watched only educational tapes. I was given only educational material to read. Every game was designed to strengthen my psychic abilities and further my education." She pushed an unsteady hand through her hair. "I didn't know any of it, he never let on, not once. I never suspected, I really didn't."

  Ryland desperately wanted to take her into his arms and shield her from every hurt. He silently cursed the bars between them. This was the biggest blow Lily could have suffered. Peter Whitney had been her father, best friend, and mentor. Ryland leaned closer, rubbed his jaw along the top of her head so that her hair caught in the stubble of his shadow. It was a small caress,
a gesture of affection, or tenderness.

  Lily was grateful he remained silent. She wasn't certain she could have told him everything if he had protested or sympathized. Her faith and trust were shaken. The foundation that had been her world was cracked. "He said…" Her voice wobbled, trembled and broke.

  Ryland's heart broke right along with her voice. He found he was gripping her hand far too tightly and made an effort to ease his strength. She didn't seem to notice. She cleared her throat and tried again.

  "He tried the enhancement of psychic ability first on orphans. He tested young female children from countries where orphans were plentiful and neglected. He had the money and the connections and he brought the ones into the country he thought would suit his needs. I was one of them. No last name, just Lily. The female subjects"-she cleared her throat-"that's me, Ryland, a female subject. We were taken directly to his underground laboratory. We were tested and trained every day much like the regimen you were put through."

  She did look at him then. Her eyes swam with tears. Before she could blink them away, Ryland bent his head to hers and took them with his mouth. Tasting her tears. Kissing her eyelids gently. Tenderly. Lily blinked up at him, confusion in her gaze.

  "Tell me the rest of it, get it out, Lily."

  She lifted her head to study his face, her blue eyes so grief-stricken he felt sick. But something in his steady gaze must have reassured her. Lily took a breath and continued. "He felt the other girls and I were unwanted anyway and he was providing a decent home, medical care, and food. It was more than we had where he found us, that's how he excused his behavior. He couldn't be bothered with our names, so he called us flowers and seasons and things like Rain and Storm." She tore her hand from Ryland's, knotting her fist against her trembling mouth. "We were nothing at all to him. No more than rats in a lab."

  There was a small silence while they stared at one another. "Like me. Like my men. He repeated the experiment on us."

  Lily nodded slowly, paced away from the cage and back to him, a restless anger growing. Ryland watched the shadows chasing across her pale face as she paced back and forth, unable to remain still, and his heart went out to her. She was fighting back in the only way she knew how, with her brain, thinking things through logically.

  "And the worst of it is, all the same problems he had here, with you, he already knew about with us. My God, Ryland, he just sent those little girls out there, unprotected, unwanted, when they became too much trouble."

  Her voice was so low he could barely hear her. She was too ashamed, as if she were to blame for what her father had done.

  Ryland reached through the bars of his cage, tried to catch her arm, to pull her to him, but she was already pacing away, withdrawn, pulling her emotions in close.

  "I never saw his data, Ryland, I never had a chance to really know how he did it. What he did was pure genius-wrong, but nevertheless genius. He noticed the older antidepressants like amitriptyline decreased psychic ability, while the newer serotonin reuptake inhibitors were either neutral or they enhanced it. Dad was able to do a postmortem study on a clairvoyant. The subject demonstrated a sevenfold increase in serotonin receptors in hippocampal and amygdala tissue, compared to controls."

  "You're losing me."

  She waved a dismissing hand, not looking at him, still pacing. "Parts of the brain. Never mind, just listen. Moreover, it was a receptor subtype with completely new binding characteristics. He sequenced the protein, found the associated gene, cloned it, and inserted the gene and expanded it in a cultured cell line. He elucidated the protein structure with computer modeling and then modified an existing serotonin reuptake inhibitor to have high specificity for the newly discovered ligand. The tricky part was to keep the molecule lipid soluble, so it would cross the blood-brain barrier. Presto! Suddenly the radio was tuned to the right station."

  "Baby, I'm not understanding a word you're saying." Lily didn't realize it, but she had shifted from hurt daughter to interested scientist. "Can you speak English for me?"

  Lily continued to pace, quick, agitated movements betraying her inner turmoil; she was speaking more to herself than to him. "Not all subjects had the same abilities. Like a poorly performing weight lifter, the answer was more drugs. Using a threefold program of training was a stroke of brilliance. Each separate avenue provided a way to enhance the natural abilities. And he used pulses of electricity, much like they've tried with Parkinson's disease in the hopes that it would stimulate more activity. But the little girls all began to fall apart, on sensory overload. He found there were a few anchors in the mix and all the other girls gravitated toward them. He thought it was their young ages. They began to have severe emotional and physical problems. Seizures causing brain bleeds, hysteria, night terrors, symptoms associated with severe trauma. I think the pulsing electricity probably caused the brain bleeds, but I'll have to study it further. They were just children. We were just children."

  She turned away from Ryland, crossing her arms across her breasts. "He turned off the natural filters and then abandoned them all. I was a subject. He called me that. Subject Lily."

  Staring away from him toward the computer, she looked desolate. "He realized the girls were going to overload, burn out, so he hastily found them families, came up with some plausible explanation for their problems, and turned his back on them. He kept me because I was an anchor and he hoped to use me again." She turned her head then, her blue eyes cloudy with pain. "And he did."

  "Lily." Her name was an ache between them. Her beautiful name, so much like her, pure and perfect and elegant. He wanted to strangle her father with his bare hands. Ryland knew there was much more to it. Peter Whitney was a scientist driven to achieve. He wasn't a man who would deliberately hurt another human being, but he was ruthless in his methods. Ryland could see him "purchasing" the little orphan children from a country that didn't want them anyway. He had the money and the connections.

  "When he decided to try again, he used grown men, already well disciplined." She looked at him. "I don't even know my real name."

  Ryland managed to catch her shirtsleeve and reel her in. He pulled her against the bars, close to him, slipping his arms around her, unable to stop himself. She was stiff and resistant, but he tucked her beneath the shelter of his shoulder, close to his heart where she belonged. "Your name is Lily Whitney. You are the woman I want at my side night and day. I want you to be the mother of my children someday. I want you for my lover. I want you for the person I turn to when the world gets to be too much."

  She made a soft sound of protest, a cry deep in her throat, and tried to turn away from him, but he caught her face with his hands, bent over her protectively, instinctively shielding her from the camera, even though it was not functioning. "I know you can't hear me when I say this right now, but you were Peter's world. He was a man without laughter or love, driven by his brain's need to learn more. I saw the way he looked at you. He loved you; he may not have started out that way, but he grew to love you. He may not have brought you into his life for the right reasons, but he kept you because he loved you. He couldn't bear to part with you. You made him know what love was." Ryland would have said anything to take away her pain, but as he uttered the words, he felt they were true.

  She shook her head in denial, not daring to believe him because if he were wrong it would be another knife through her heart. "You can't know that."

  His gray eyes glittered with truth. "I do know. Remember what he said to you? He wanted you to find the others and make it right. He was talking about those other girls. He knew what he did was wrong and he attempted to make up for it, finding the children homes, setting up trust funds for them. It was wrong, Lily, but he didn't operate on the same kind of wavelength as the rest of us." He had caught the rest of her father's intentions in her mind and used the knowledge shamelessly.

  She waved her hand toward the surface. "They're out there somewhere. He poked in their brains, turned something on they can't turn off, stripped
away every natural filter they had; he left us all to fend for ourselves." She looked up at him. "Higgens and the people here can never know about the girls. If they find them, they'll use them-then kill them."

  "You have to destroy the tapes," Ryland said. "There's no other way to protect everybody, Lily, to protect others in the future. Your father knew that or he wouldn't have asked you to destroy his data. They couldn't pull any information off his hard drives. He made certain he never recorded anything of use where they could get to it."

  "Those tapes are the only things I have that might give me a clue as to how to reverse the process, Ryland. If I get rid of them, there's no going back."

  "We already knew that, honey. Peter knew it too. He repeated his experiment, a little more refined, with older, much more disciplined subjects, but the end result was still the same. Breakdowns, seizures, trauma. Sensory overload."

  "I have to view them all. I can't take a chance on missing any of the details. I have a photographic memory. What I read or view, I'll remember. It's going to take time. My father was suspicious over at least two deaths, Ryland, and I'm worried about you and the men. He wanted you out of here, enough to ask me to help. After reading his report, I think he might have had reason to worry. I agree with him that you and the others aren't safe here. There are records of phone calls from my father to several military officials, yet no one pulled the plug on Higgens. I have no idea how far up the chain of command the stink goes. That's your department. You have to figure out who you can trust. I'll try to feel out General Ranier, but I haven't been able to reach him. He's been a family friend since I was a child."

  He nodded, his gray eyes intent on her face. "Lily, we have to talk about last night. We can't pretend it didn't happen."

  Lily shook her head. He wanted her to believe he could fall in love with her when he didn't even know her. They didn't know anything about one another. He thought it would reassure her that in some way she was lovable, but it only reinforced her belief that her father had enhanced the chemistry between them.